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The Demoiselles D'evanston: on the Aesthetics of the Wigmore Chart

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The Demoiselles D'evanston: on the Aesthetics of the Wigmore Chart The Demoiselles d'Evanston: On the Aesthetics of the Wigmore Chart The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Bruce L. Hay, The Demoiselles d'Evanston: On the Aesthetics of the Wigmore Chart, 73 Law, Probability & Risk 211 (2008). Published Version doi: 10.1093/lpr/mgn003 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11998341 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP Les Demoiselles d’Evanston: On the Aesthetics of the Wigmore Chart Bruce L. Hay Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA† Forthcoming, Law, Probability and Risk (fall 2008) There is an old adage that the Investigating Officer can often remember to good purpose, namely, “Cherchez la femme,” “Seek for the woman.”1 I The International Exhibition of Modern Art arrived arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago in March 1913, a few months before John Wigmore of Northwestern University published the The Problem of Judicial Proof, in which he introduced his “chart method” of analyzing and evidence.2 Known as the Armory Show, the exhibition was billed as America’s first big introduction to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and the other fashionable isms of the contemporary European art scene.3 (“Splash! Splotch! Cubist Art Here,” one Chicago newspaper headline † Email: [email protected]. AUTHOR’S NOTE: This paper was originally presented at a conference on Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence at Cardozo Law School, most papers from which were published in a special issue of Law, Probability & Risk in December 2007. I thank Peter Tillers for organizing the conference and including me. 1 GROSS, H. (1924). Criminal Investigation: A Practical Textbook for Magistrates, Police Officer and Lawyers. London: Sweet & Maxwell, __. 2 WIGMORE, J. (1913) The Problem of Proof. Illinois Law Review, 8, 83. Portions of the articles were taken from his book, WIGMORE, J. (1913). The Principles of Judicial Proof as Given by Logic, Psychology, and General Experience and Illustrated in Judicial Trials . Boston: Little, Brown. 3 The exhibition opened in New York’s 69th Regiment Armory in February 1913, featuring about 1,250 paintings, sculptures and decorative objects by about 300 European and American artists. About half of those works traveled Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1308602 announced, following the popular press’s custom of using “cubist” as an umbrella term to designate all of the strange new styles.4) It is intriguing to speculate (for I have been unable to determine) whether Wigmore attended the exhibition, and if so whether he saw any connection between the art on display there and the schematic diagrams in his Judicial Proof article, which came out in June of that year. If he did see a connection it was, to his mind, probably negative. Wigmore was enormously learned and had a wide-ranging knowledge of many cultures, but his leanings were had Victorian. He would have considered his chart method, designed as it was for the orderly administration of justice, as being firmly opposed to the decadence, libertinism, anarchism, bolshevism, and sheer mental derangement that many traditionalists discerned in the works of Matisse, Gauguin, Duchamp, Picasso, and other artists of what the newspapers called the “advance guard.” Indeed, Wigmore presented his method as a self-conscious reaction to what he saw as the disorder reigning in the continental legal systems. What America needs, he says in his 1913 article, is “a probative science – the principles of proof – independent of the artificial rules of procedure.”5 If we fail to develop one, “we shall find ourselves in the present plight of Continental Europe,” where in the previous century “the ancient to Chicago and then to Boston. For a general account of the exhibition, see BROWN, M. (1988). The Story of the Armory Show. New York: Abbeville Press. 4 Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 March 1913, p. 1. 5 The Wigmore quotations in this paragraph are from The Problem of Proof, supra note 1, pp. 77-78. 2 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1308602 3 Figure 1. Wigmore, Chart of the Evidence in Commonwealth v. Umilian. 1913. From The Problem of Proof worn-out numerical system of ‘legal proof’ was abolished by fiat and the so-called ‘free proof’ – namely, no system at all – was substituted.” European jurists, he explains, never acquired an “understanding of the living process of belief; in consequence, when ‘legal proof’ was abolished, they were unready, and judicial trials have been carried on for a century past by uncomprehended, unguided, and therefore unsafe mental processes.” He makes free proof sound like the juridical equivalent of free love; his talk of “unsafe mental processes” echoes what the guardians of public morals in Chicago are saying about the strange, unconventional nudes at the Armory Show. “Nasty, lewd, immoral, and indecent,” one schoolteacher declares; do not expose the young to these “degeneracies of Paris,” a clergyman warns.6 “The idea that some people can gaze at this sort of thing without its hurting them is all bosh. This exhibition ought to be suppressed,” says the president of the city’s Law and Order League. And newspaper calls the work “pollution … materialized in several paintings of the nude; portrayals that unite in an insult to the great, self-respecting public of Chicago. Just who is responsible for this showing of dishonor to sensitive great art that finds expression in the chaste and beautiful painting of the human figure in the nude in our Institute?” And a speaker at at a ladies’ group in Evanston intones: “The body is the temple of God, and the cubists have profaned 6 The remaining quotations in this paragraph are taken from The Story of the Armory Show, supra note 2, p. 206. 4 the temple.”7 Whatever Wigmore’s one views on the exhibition were, it is unlikely he thought it had much in common with his own work. Still, certain parallels between his chart method and artistic modernism are hard to resist. His project should, I think, be seen as part of the response to the “crisis of representation” making itself felt in many forms of cultural production at the time. Think of the year 1913 alone:8 Russell and Whitehead complete the Principia Mathematica, providing what they think will be a firm logical foundation for mathematics; Wittgenstein begins the correspondence concerning Russell’s theory of knowledge that will result in the Tractatus; Saussure dies, prompting the publication of his Cours de Linguistique Generale from student notes; in the legal academy, Hohfeld publishes his Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning. In the arts, the Rite of Spring, composed by Stravinsky and choreographed by Nijinsky, sparks a riot at its premiere in Paris; Malevich paints his Black Square, thought by some art historians to be the first purely abstract painting in western art; Joyce’s Portrait of the 7 Not all Chicagoans had such narrow-minded reactions. Many were enthusiastic about the new styles; others were skeptical, but urged “fair play for insurgent art,” as one Chicago newspaper put it. See The Story of the Armory Show, supra note 1, at 179. See also Martinez, A. (19__). A Mixed Reception for Modernism: The 1913 Armory Show at the Art Institute of Chicago. Museum Studies, 19, 30; PRINCE, S. (1990). Chicago Critics Take on Modernism. The Old Guard and the Avante-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-40 (S. Prince ed.), pp. 98-102. On responses to the exhibition across the country, see MANCINI, J.M. (1999). “One Term is as Fatuous as Another”: Responses to the Armory Show Reconsidered. American Quarterly, 51, 833. 8 I am indebted to Neal Feigenson for some of the examples in the paragraph. A recent treatment of that year’s achievements is Rabaté, J. (2007). 1913: The Cradle of Modernism. 5 Artist as a Young Man is serialized, the first volume of the Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu iss published, and Virginia Woolf completes her first novel. In their different way each of these works, like Wigmore’s method, is a self-conscious effort to develop a new language for its aesthetic or intellectual domain. The Wigmore article doesn’t make the splash these other works do, but that shouldn’t keep us from viewing it in their company. The Wigmore chart system, as Peter Tillers has remarked, is an important precursor to current research on the visual representation of information, and for that reason deserves the attention of anyone interested in the subject of the recent symposium in these pages on visual evidence. 9 The analytical properties of the Wigmore system have been well explored by a number of scholars who have approached it from the perspective of cognitive science, demonstrating its potential value for drawing correct inferences from disaggregated bits of information.10 I am a fan of this work, being partial to the use of visual diagrams and also to the 9 See TILLERS, P. (2007). Introduction: Visualizing Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings. Law, Probability & Risk , 6, 4. Wigmore’s system has been mostly ignored by evidence scholars, who view it in rather the same way traditionalists saw the artistic avant-garde work of the period: as weird and illegible. The difference, of course, is that the avant-garde works of that era have now become mainstream, while the the Wigmore article is still generally seen as a “quaint, even bizarre, period piece,” as William Twining characterizes the prevailing attitude.
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